Water Authority. IID's Energy Department provides electric power to more than 145,000 customers in the Imperial Valley and parts of Riverside and San Diego counties. Service to residents of the Imperial Valley and Coachella valleys includes the Imperial Valley cities of El Centro, Calexico, Holtville, Brawley and Coachella Valley cities including Mecca, Thermal, La Quinta, Coachella and Indio, Bermuda Dunes, Thousand Palms, Indio Hills and Sky Valley. As the third largest public power utility in California, IID controls more than 1,100 megawatts of power derived from a diverse resource portfolio that includes its own generation, and long- and short-term power purchases. Located in what's been referred to as the "renewable energy capital of the world", IID serves as a catalyst for renewable energy development in the Imperial Valley and is going to great lengths to enhance its energy infrastructure to be able to move renewable energy generated in the Imperial Valley to markets far and wide. The Energy Department has an aggressive transmission expansion plan and, over the next five years, intends to invest $1 billion in its energy infrastructure, which includes building a state-of-the-art energy battery storage unit in El Centro, which would provide backup energy resources but also help the IID grid integrate the many megawatts of solar energy entering the IID grid during the day. Salton Sea Under the nation's largest ag-to-urban water conservation transfer agreement (called the Quantification Settlement Agreement, a series of pacts between California water districts to help California live within its 4.4 million acre-foot entitlement right of Colorado River water), since 2003 water has been, and continues to be, released to the Salton Sea to mitigate negative environmental impacts. But the agreement calls for this for the first 15 years of the water transfer. (Water conserved on Imperial Valley farms and in the IID water delivery system is provided to Southern California coastal communities—specifically the San Diego County Water Authority, the Coachella Valley Water District and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California). This flow of mitigation water to the sea will end on December 31, 2017. To date, the State of California has not lived up to its obligation to develop a restoration plan for the sea. Because the declining Salton Sea poses a serious public health crisis to the residents living in the Imperial and Coachella Valleys (as dried shoreline soil and sediments, saturated with agricultural chemicals, will be spread by